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Indirect Costs on Interagency Agreements

Currently, due to a law that states "all costs must be collected for interagency agreements", indirect costs are collected to cover overhead. Since all government agencies incur indirect costs, there should not be any charge between these agencies to collect these expenses. We all work for the same company, the Federal government, and should not be charging these expenses against each other. It should just be a wash. Since our process in manual, there are a lot of personnel hours being spent doing the calculations in the beginning, with billings and then with the distribution of these costs as work proceeds that could be better spent doing other work. It also affects the work that the scientists can do since they are sometimes shorted on their funding when another agency will only provide a certain amount of funding for the project and we have to take indirects out of that total. This process only creates more overhead that could be completely eliminated with a change to the wording on this law.